- Position1 of 3›
- No, schools should not be able to ban books
The First Amendment gives everyone the right to hear all sides of an issue to make their own conclusions and judgments. Banning books infringes upon this right by preventing a person from receiving and interpreting ideas. This prevents a meaningful exercise of our freedom of speech and expression.
The argument
This argument treats a school book ban as a free speech question rather than a curriculum question. The First Amendment protects both freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and speaking and writing are not incidental to education — they are among the things education chiefly consists of. A restriction placed on which books a student may read is therefore not a neutral administrative decision about shelf space; it reaches directly into the activity the First Amendment protects, and on this reading it should count as a violation of it. The connection between reading and expression is what carries the argument. Children do not arrive at what they want to say from nowhere. What they are able to express is shaped by what they have encountered, so restricting the content available to them restricts, at one remove, how fully they are able to express themselves. A ban does not simply withhold a particular book; it narrows the range of thought and language a student can draw on, which is why proponents describe it as an attack on expression rather than merely an inconvenience. The final objection concerns who does the banning and for whom. A ban originates in a judgement made by a school, or by a single official within one, that a particular book is unsuitable. But a disagreement of that kind is one person's assessment, and the effect of acting on it is to remove the book from every student in the school. Every child is different, with different maturity, interests and background, so a single official's disagreement is a poor basis for deciding what is acceptable for all of them to read. Because banning school books attacks freedom of speech and expression in these ways, this argument concludes, schools should not be able to ban books.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Books should not be considered a part of the Freedom of Speech or Freedom of Expression. Reading is technically not essential to speech or expression since neither requires the written word. There are other means of expressing oneself besides reading choice, so should not be included within the First Amendment.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] Banning books is not in violation of the First Amendment.